Sparse Auto-Encoders and Holism about Large Language Models
Does Large Language Model (LLM) technology suggest a meta-semantic picture i.e. a picture of how words and complex expressions come to have the meaning that they do? One modest approach explores the assumptions that seem to be built into how LLMs capture the meanings of linguistic expressions as a way of considering their plausibility (Grindrod, 2026a, 2026b). It has previously been argued that LLMs, in employing a form of distributional semantics, adopt a form of holism about meaning (Grindrod, 2023; Grindrod et al., forthcoming). However, recent work in mechanistic interpretability presents a challenge to these arguments. Specifically, the discovery of a vast array of interpretable late...
| Authors | Jumbly Grindrod |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 27 March 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 27 March 2026 |
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